QEMU Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004) -- From Install to Play in 15 Mins
7Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004) was a game in troubles at retailed release. The game studio was broke, severed their ties with the publisher and released anyway in unfinished and buggy state, likely the last attempt to recoup the loss in investment. Unsurprising, the game then suffered a commercial failure, partly in bad timing competing with Half-Life 2. Despite all of that, the Game had groomed a cult following, received post-release support from fans, supplying Unofficial Patches that fixed engine bugs, re-added disabled contents and new quests.
Taking Game Preservation up to the challenge, let us figure out if this troubled Game can be restored in "pristine condition" of Retailed Originality with only the final Official 1.2 patch in QEMU virtual machine. It has never meant to belittle the efforts of fans' mods that brought after-life rejuvenation for such games to be played in modern days. And it seemed that we are there, almost. When the game was released in unfinished buggy state, it made even more sense to play it with the peace-of-mind isolation in QEMU virtual machine. Who knows if the game would crash, wipe out the SSD or corrupt the OS if it was run with administrative privileges.
Oh... for the FOOLS' pretense that put virtualization out-of-scope as "PC emulation", THIS IS ALL *\*BS\**. Let those have FUNs building period-correct retro PCs to play this game as many had realized the whatever "TRASH"Boxes or "JUNK_PC"em had always FAILED at playing 20+-year old games in the lame excuse of playing up the Accuracy *\*BS\**.
Hmm.... wouldn't it be nice to walk-through the first game before the sequel -- Bloodlines 2 -- to be released around the corner?'🤣🤣